Principals tell Bullhead City School Board student teaming, classroom coaching producing gains; board to weigh continued external coaching funding

Principals at four district schools reported to the Bullhead City School Board on March 20 that the districtwide rollout of Instructional Empowerment (IE or MOI) has increased student collaboration, introduced common lesson success criteria and produced measurable mid‑year gains on some benchmark tests.

At a workshop meeting, Principal Julie Vela summarized classroom-level evidence: videos, “look and learn” visits, and repeated “rigor walks” have shifted teacher practice and student behavior toward student-led teaming and “evidence of learning,” she said. “So now it’s all about evidence,” Vela said, describing how teachers moved from checking whether routines were in place to requiring students to show evidence that they met success criteria.

The principals showed assessment data they said reflected those changes. Vela presented end-of-standard results she attributed to her sixth-grade ELA and math benchmark cycles, reporting examples such as reading-for-information proficiency moving from 41.3% to 67.2% across interim tests and math number-sense results improving from 20.8% to 44.5% on the tests she shared. She said Galileo year-over-year comparisons also show a reduction in the percentage of minimally proficient students in some grades. "We're…